Best Bedbug Warrior

New York’s 2009 pick, Boot a Pest, remains a sought-after bedbug-buster, but another outfit has become a go-to combatant: Standard Pest Management. Its president is Gil Bloom, an entomologist who last year served on the city’s Bed Bug Advisory Board. He’s a regular at bedbug summits, keeping up on cutting-edge methods and, as he puts it, “staying on top of the technical curve.” Multipronged attacks are key, he says, and the newest weapon in his arsenal is known as thermal remediation. The details are complicated, but it amounts to baking an infested space at 135 degrees, nuking the bugs. (It’s especially suited to areas like libraries that can’t be easily emptied.) Standard Pest is also known for quieting frazzled nerves with detailed instructions to prevent reinfestation.

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So what exactly does “best” mean in a city with thousands of pizza joints, hundreds of celebrity masseuses, and museum-worthy concept shops on every corner? Well, in the case of this, our annual “Best of New York” roundup, there’s a heavy emphasis on what’s new or what has somehow remained virtually unheard of (until now, of course).